Kamala Harris’s Father…..

The New York Times does a backgrounder on Kamala Harris and her distant relationship with her father , Donald J. Harris, 86, who divorced her mother when she was a child….and since remarried…….

The Vice President was tight with her mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris,  who passed away in 2009….

Donald J. Harris, 86, a distinguished economist, lives with his second wife only two miles from the vice president’s official residence in Washington, yet he has been estranged for years from his daughter and the two seldom speak. Ms. Harris’s convention speech was a rare instance when she named her father publicly — a striking contrast to the praise she showers regularly on her mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, a biomedical scientist who died in 2009.

To the extent that Dr. Harris has been mentioned during his daughter’s presidential campaign, it is Ms. Harris’s detractors who have brought him up.

“Her father’s a Marxist professor in economics,” former President Donald J. Trump said derisively during his debate with Ms. Harris last month. “And he taught her well.”

Interviews with more than a dozen friends and former colleagues of Dr. Harris reveal two notable themes. First, Ms. Harris’s father, a Jamaican-born emeritus professor of economics at Stanford University, has been a critic of mainstream economic theory from the left but is hardly a Marxist.

Second, Dr. Harris has been a mostly absent figure from his daughter’s life but not an irrelevant one. Well before she set out on her political trajectory, her father was racking up achievements and, like her mother, setting a high standard that in retrospect helps explain Ms. Harris’s own ascent.

Friends of both say the estrangement, set in motion by her parents’ split when Ms. Harris was a child, may have as much to do with traits father and daughter share as it does their decades of differences. Both are focused, demanding much of themselves and of others. Both can be generous mentors and devoted friends while warily maintaining a zone of privacy from everyone else. Both place a high premium on loyalty. Both can be stubborn.